How to view your iPhoto images on an Apple TV

Reader HS would love to see his photos on his Apple TV, but can’t. He writes:

“I’ve recently returned from a trip to Australia with a lot of pictures on my camera. I’d like to view those pictures on my Apple TV, but I don’t see an entry other than Photo Stream. How can I stream my pictures from iPhoto to my Apple TV?”

Although you may believe that iPhoto is key to this process, that’s not the case. Instead, turn to iTunes.

Launch that application on your Mac, choose File > Home Sharing > Choose Photos to Share With Apple TV. In the Photo Sharing Preferences window that appears, enable the Share Photos From option and then be sure that iPhoto is selected from the pop-up menu next to it. (You could otherwise choose Aperture if you had a copy, a folder of your choosing or the Pictures folder in your user account.)

To share all your pictures enable the All photos, albums, Events and Faces option. If you choose, instead, to share just particular albums, events or faces, enable the next option – Selected albums, Events and Faces. If you enable this option, you’ll have to select the collections of pictures you want to see from the Albums, Events and Faces lists that appear.

Regardless of which of these two options you enable, you can additionally choose to include videos by enabling the option of the same name. Once you’ve made your choice, click Apply.

Use iTunes to choose the images to view on your Apple TV.

Now move to your Apple TV, select Computers on its home screen, click the Select button and you’ll see a Photos entry that wasn’t there before. Select that, click the Select button, and you’ll see entries for your photos, split into their appropriate categories – Events, Photos, Faces and Albums, for example. Choose one of these items, press Select and you’ll see thumbnail images of the pictures within the item. At this point you can select an image, click Select and then page through your images using the remote’s Next and Back buttons.

Or you can select Slideshow, press Select and then configure your slideshow with the many options that appear on the resulting screen. For example, you can choose music to accompany your slideshow, shuffle your images, configure the slideshow to repeat and choose a theme. When you’re ready to begin, just select and click Start Slideshow.